Chicago State Launches FCS Football Era with Coach Bobby Rome II

Bobby Rome II stepped into a job that didn't exist three years ago. Chicago State University, which spent decades as a basketball-and-track institution, launched its inaugural FCS football season in 2026 under Rome's direction, the product of a years-long push to expand the Cougars' athletic footprint in one of the country's most competitive sports markets.

Rome, hired in April 2025 after CSU announced its head coaching search on February 11 of that year, has framed his mandate in blunt terms: winning right away. He stressed the importance of immediate wins in an interview featured on The FCS Edge by Opta Analyst, a posture that reflects the institutional pressure behind a program built from scratch rather than rebuilt from decline.

The path to a football program began in 2023, when CSU launched a fundraising campaign specifically aimed at expanding its sports offerings, with Division I FCS football as the marquee target. The campaign first produced women's triathlon, added for the 2024-25 academic year under the NCAA Emerging Sports for Women program, before the university turned its full attention to football's operational launch.

The groundwork for this moment actually stretches back nearly a decade. In April 2016, the University Budget Committee recommended that the Athletic Department "... study the benefits of being Division 1 or another division," a directive shaped by CSU's financial constraints at the time. That study eventually gave way to the 2023 campaign and, ultimately, a football program debuting in the spring of 2026.

With football now active, CSU sponsors eight men's sports, including basketball, cross country, golf, soccer, tennis, track and field, and volleyball, alongside seven women's programs. The university has described itself as sponsoring seven men's and nine women's teams in NCAA-sanctioned competition, a count that reflects ongoing program additions beyond what the sports table captures at any given moment.

For FCS football, Chicago State represents a genuine expansion of the landscape, not a reshuffling. A program launched in a major urban market, built without an existing football culture to fall back on, and led by a coach publicly committed to winning from day one carries weight well beyond a single conference or region. Rome inherits the hardest version of a startup: no tradition, no margin for patience, and a fanbase that hasn't yet decided whether to pay attention.